Mozilla has released Firefox 104. It includes support for Disney+ subtitles in Picture-in-Picture mode and a new tool to analyse a website’s power usage. When you minimize Firefox, the browser’s UI will be throttled to boost the computer’s performance and reduce battery usage.
The full release notes are as follows:
| New | Subtitles are now available for Disney+ in Picture-in-Picture. |
| Firefox now supports both the scroll-snap-stop property as well as re-snapping. You can use the scroll-snap-stop property"s always and normal values to specify whether or not to pass the snap points, even when scrolling fast. Re-snapping tries to keep the last snap position after any content/layout changes. | |
| The Firefox profiler can analyze power usage of a website (Apple M1 and Windows 11 only). | |
| The Firefox UI itself will now be throttled for performance and battery usage when minimized or occluded, in the same way background tabs are. | |
| Fixed | Highlight color is preserved correctly after typing Enter in the mail composer of Yahoo Mail and Outlook. |
| After bypassing the https only error page navigating back would take you to the error page that was previously dismissed. Back now takes you to the previous site that was visited. | |
| Paste unformatted shortcut (shift+ctrl/cmd+v) now works in plain text contexts, such as input and text area. | |
| Various security fixes. | |
| Enterprise | Various bug fixes and new policies have been implemented in the latest version of Firefox. You can find more information in the Firefox for Enterprise 104 Release Notes. |
The update is quite modest in terms of updates, which is not surprising given that it’s the summer and Mozilla employees probably aren’t operating at 100% due to holidays and the like. Nevertheless, if you rely on PIP mode to watch Disney+ content, then it’s nice that you’ll be able to pull up the subtitles too in that mini window.
The fact that the UI is also throttled when a window is minimized will be helpful for laptop users who need to keep their computer running for hours without plugging in to charge. With the new power analyser tool in the Firefox profiler, website developers will also be able to make the websites they work on more power efficient.
To update Firefox, just open the hamburger menu go to Help, then About Firefox. It should automatically start looking for and downloading the update on Windows and macOS. If you are on Linux, then you’ll have to wait for the update to be made available through your update manager.